Michael Tanner

Within the space of a few weeks we have had the rare chance of seeing the two great torsos of Russian opera, Borodin’s Prince Igor, unfinished because the composer was often otherwise engaged, and Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina, unfinished because its composer died of drink. Prince Igor at the Coliseum was musically magnificent, and dramatically utterly absurd, ‘self-parody’ that did not do justice to its low-jinks. By contrast, Birmingham Opera Company’s Khovanskygate is musically at least as superb, and dramatically gripping though questionable. As is usual with BOC, the location is unorthodox, in this case an immense tent in the middle of Cannon Hill Park.

I remain puzzled that, so far as I know, no daily or weekly paper carries reviews of the New York Met opera relays (I’m not a denizen of the blogosphere, where they may well swarm). To judge from the number of cinemas that show these live relays, and from how crowded most of them are, clearly more people see opera in this form than in any other. And many of those people will be experiencing opera live for the first time in cinemas, and may well never go to an opera house. I suspect there is a strong element of snobbery involved on the part of non-reviewers, as if one hasn’t really been to a performance unless one was actually in the theatre where it was taking place.

Every time there’s a new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni I have to ask the same question: why is this opera, which 50 years ago was considered an unqualified masterpiece and an invariable success in the theatre, now always a wretched failure when it is staged? I would hesitate to say that the new production by Kasper Holten is the worst I have seen, since the competition is so intense. But it certainly ranks among the worst, and is all the more infuriating because a mainly excellent cast has been assembled. Anyone who longed for the previous production, by Francesca Zambello, to be supplanted will be saying, ‘Come back, all is forgiven.’ Where Zambello failed to cast any light on the opera, Holten shrouds it in impenetrable darkness, metaphorically speaking.

Anyone who frequents the internet will have come across YouTube and soon learned that what may have been planned as a quick information-seeking visit turns into several happy hours, as tempting suggestions are made as to what you might also be interested in seeing; another thing leads to yet another; and that is the afternoon gone. There is no more alluring — and of course, one insists to oneself, educational — primrose path than tapping into how a particular operatic aria has been sung by a variety of performers over the decades, so that what started out as a comparison between, say, Anna Netrebko and Renata Scotto as Mimi turns into a marathon search for the ideal rendering of ‘Si, mi chiamano Mimi’ and then on to other Puccini arias, and so on.

This is the first of my more-or-less monthly columns, the idea of which is to report on operatic events other than those that take place at the two major London venues, with occasional trips to those areas (i.e., everywhere other than London) where the annual government grant for the arts is £4.80 per head, while in London it is £69.00. This fact was widely reported a few weeks ago, but while I thought for an hour or two that it might lead to a revolution, there was no widespread articulate reaction to it of any kind, nor, so far as I know, any indication that this gross inequity would be addressed. So if conspicuous consumption is what you’re after, you’ll know where you have to be. That’s not my main topic for this particular column, however.

I’ve been hoping that in this, the last of my weekly columns on opera, I would be able to strike a positive, even cheerful note on the present and future of the art form, but honesty compels me to say that I don’t think it is in very good shape. Not, probably, that it has ever been, or at least only for brief periods. Owing to its mongrel nature, there has usually been a tendency for one or other of its ingredients to lord it over the others, so that the ideal balance of music and drama, spectacle and action, personalised in the collaboration of singers and conductors, stage directors and musicians, has only been rarely achieved.

Debussy’s description of the music of Parsifal as being ‘lit up from behind’ is famous; less so is Wagner’s own remark to Cosima that in his last music drama he was trying to get ‘the effect of clouds merging and separating’. The scoring of the music, especially in the outer acts, is so extraordinary that even people who are repelled by the subject matter of Parsifal, such as Nietzsche, are still overwhelmed by its beauty, which uniquely combines sensuousness and spirituality. It’s a beauty that has to cope with and contain a very great deal of pain, more even than Act III of Tristan.

There aren’t many operas from which you can extract a single act and make a concert of it, in fact I can’t think of any except ones by Wagner. I’ve been to Act I of Die Walküre, Act III of Die Meistersinger¸ Act III of Parsifal at the Proms, Act II of Lohengrin, and several times to Act II of Tristan und Isolde. It’s not that Wagner’s acts tend to be longer than anyone else’s, they don’t: Handel’s often last as long, so do Rossini’s.

Of this year’s three musical birthday boys, Wagner has fared, in England, surprisingly well, Verdi inexplicably badly, and Britten, as was to be expected, has received the royal treatment. No one could have predicted, though, that the culmination of the celebrations would be as glorious as it was: a single semi-staged performance at the Barbican of what, in my minority opinion, is his operatic masterpiece, Albert Herring. Surely after attending it, or hearing it on Radio 3, that might become a majority opinion.

Visits by English Touring Opera are always to be looked forward to, but this autumn it has surpassed itself with three baroque works, two of them masterpieces and the third a fascinating rarity, all performed by casts of astonishingly high calibre, and produced helpfully, resourcefully, with simple elegant sets, which are all that is needed, though they probably cost a thousandth as much as the eye-catching splurges that we often see in London. First up, anyway at the Arts Theatre Cambridge, was the rarity: Cavalli’s Jason (intelligent to translate the titles where possible, since all the operas are sung in English). Apparently, it was the 17th century’s most popular opera, though that must be hard to determine.

A new production of The Magic Flute is something to look forward to, if with apprehension. How many aspects of this protean masterpiece will it encompass, and how many will be neglected or distorted? The answer, in the case of Simon McBurney’s effort at the Coliseum, is that almost everything that contributes to the work’s greatness is ignored or reduced, so that an evening that should be spent in a state of growing elation merely induces irritation deepening to rage, with patches of life-draining boredom. Not that the first-night audience shared my view, to judge from the roar of applause that greeted the final curtain, and the frequent guffaws and outbursts of clapping during the work.

When Keith Warner’s production of Berg’s Wozzeck was first produced at the Royal Opera, nine years ago, it made me more angry than any that I had ever seen. At its first revival in 2006, my response was milder, though still outraged. Now, on its third outing, I mind it even less, partly because the musical performance is so strong. Warner has returned to oversee this revival, which, if memory serves, is little different from the last one, so he still regards Wozzeck as the portrayal of an experiment, with Wozzeck as the guinea pig, and the rest of the cast, with minor exceptions, as his tormenting experimenters. Most of the stage is a huge white room, suggesting a nightmare hospital or a morgue, and containing four large vitrines, with huge toadstools, etc. in three of them.

Verdi’s Les vêpres siciliennes is his least performed mature opera, even in its more familiar version as I vespri siciliani. So mounting it with a top-ranking cast and an interesting production is just what the Royal Opera should do in a so far seriously under-celebrated Verdi bicentenary year. What has actually happened is that we have a first-rate musical performance and a dismally confusing, cluttered, pretentious and conspicuously consuming production by the most fashionable of Continental directors, Stefan Herheim, abetted by the set designs of Philipp Fürhofer and the ideas of his regular dramaturg Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach.

This year’s live relays of New York Met performances have a markedly Slav flavour, with Shostakovich’s rare The Nose next up, and later Dvorak’s Rusalka and, most interestingly, Borodin’s Prince Igor. It kicked off with Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, the most popular though not the finest of his operas. On the first night there were sustained protests both outside and inside the Met, against the Putin crony Valery Gergiev and against Anna Netrebko, a supporter of the plutocrat dictator. Odd that there aren’t more protests, when you think that people still get heated and even write books about musicians who stayed in the Third Reich, often acting courageously. There were no protests, alas, before the matinée that was broadcast.

Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus (but if it’s given in English, why not The Bat? Does that somehow sound too unglamorous?) is not only the greatest operetta ever composed, as everyone agrees, but also, in my view, a great work, to be ranked with the finest comedies in any genre. That is, beneath its featherbrained hedonism there is a core of seriousness, conveyed as usual by Strauss in glittering music that never lets you forget that all good things come to an end, usually sooner than you expect. But that is only part of its claim to an exalted status that the term ‘operetta’ seems to deny. As in many great comedies, several of the characters spend much of the time in disguise, and sing some of their most telling music when they are pretending to be someone else.

Why would anyone want to adapt Berg’s Lulu, a masterpiece even if a problematic one? According to John Fulljames, who is the producer of the version of Lulu that Olga Neuwirth has come up with, ‘the Lulu plays now stand neutered within the familiar history of male authored texts which define women from a male perspective...Neuwirth turns this on its head. For the first time, Lulu is allowed to tell her own story...We [the audience] listen and watch but do nothing and so become complicit in her nightly repeated murder.’ How can people talk such nonsense?

It’s a cynical start to the Royal Opera’s season to have this 1984 production of Puccini’s last opera Turandot. Not that a new production would improve things, whatever it was like. Turandot is an irredeemable work, a terrible end to a career that had included three indisputable masterpieces and three less evident ones, counting Il Trittico as one. Any operatic composer who gets to the stage, as Puccini had, of searching through one play or novel after another, dissatisfied with any subject he is offered, should almost certainly give up.